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I first encountered Larry Dossey through his landmark 1982 book Space, Time & Medicine, published by Shambhala with a foreword by Fritjof Capra. Reading it was a quiet turning point for me. Here was a working American internist — a battalion surgeon decorated for valor in Vietnam, later Chief of Staff of Medical City Dallas Hospital — daring to bring the insights of modern physics into the consulting room and the hospital ward. Larry showed me that consciousness could not be contained inside the skull, that mind reached beyond the boundaries of space and time, and that healing itself was a nonlocal event. Long before it was fashionable, and often at professional cost, he opened a door through which many of us walked. I have always considered him one of my earliest and most enduring mentors, a physician of rare intellectual courage and even rarer tenderness of spirit. In the decades since, Larry deepened that inquiry with extraordinary generosity — coining the term “nonlocal mind” in Recovering the Soul (1989), transforming medical education with the New York Times bestseller Healing Words (1993), and continuing through Reinventing Medicine, The Power of Premonitions, and One Mind. He served as co-chair of the Panel on Mind/Body Interventions at the National Institutes of Health’s Office of Alternative Medicine and as executive editor of Explore: The Journal of Science and Healing, quietly building the scholarly infrastructure that legitimized an entire field. Because of Healing Words, the number of U.S. medical schools teaching spirituality and health grew from three to nearly eighty. Yet what I honor most is not the accolades but the man — a Texas physician of the highest integrity who trusted the evidence of his patients’ lives, listened to what science could not yet explain, and gave the rest of us permission to do the same. Thank you, Larry. My gratitude is beyond measure.
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Vibrations, Sound, and HealingIn 2008, researchers at Harvard drew blood from long-term meditators, then compared their gene expression profiles to healthy controls. The finding was striking. In the meditators, 2,209 genes were expressed differently, most of them in networks that govern inflammation, energy metabolism, and the cellular stress response (Dusek et al., PLOS ONE, 2008). A follow-up study in 2013 showed that even a single intensive day of meditation was enough to change the expression of inflammatory and epigenetic genes (Kaliman et al., Psychoneuroendocrinology, 2014). Not months of practice. One day. What all of these practices share, whether silent or voiced, is a rhythmic act of attention that the body reads as safety. And of all the forms this act can take, the human voice may be the most direct. In the Vedic map of experience, the world condenses out of subtle qualities called tanmatras. Sound, or Shabda, is the first of them. Touch, sight, taste, and smell arrive afterward. In this working model of reality, as in quantum theory, vibration is the substrate from which matter is composed, and the human nervous system is tuned to that substrate. A thought “in here” is vibrationally connected to a physical result “out there.” Two worlds, mind and matter, are bridged every time you form a sound. The ancient practice of chanting a mantra was applied acoustics for the human being.
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Mercury Never Turned Around—Four Familiar IllusionsSomewhere in the maturing process, if we are fortunate, an unexpected sense of relief arrives. It has nothing to do with having finished our work or outlived our fears. It is the relief of discovering that this world, the dependable world of solid things and clear causes that we touch and that touches us back, was never quite what it appeared to be, and this discovery turns out to be good news. In fact, the familiar everyday physical world weaves a web of illusions that I often refer to as magical lies because they are so convincing that like a magic trick, they seem totally real—until you see through them. Every few months the planet Mercury, the closest planet to the sun, appears to reverse its course in the sky. For thousands of years people watched this happen and wondered what it might mean for their lives. Today, if a friend’s cherished plans fall apart, someone at the table might smile and blame the retrograde. But the sight of Mercury suddenly going backwards, in retrograde, is an illusion fostered by viewing it from Earth. Mercury never reverses. Rather, Mercury travels on an inner faster orbit around the sun, and every so often it overtakes Earth on our slower outer orbit. The backward motion depends entirely on where the Earth happens to be.
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This practice encourages you to explore the spaciousness of your own consciousness, inviting a sense of freedom and openness beyond habitual perceptions.
If you would like a meditation that honors where you are in this moment, I invite you to visit DeepakChopra.ai. |
Being in the Age of AIArtificial intelligence is changing how we work, create, connect, and care for ourselves. It also invites us to consider what it means to be human as technology becomes a greater part of our lives. My friend Poonacha Machaiah explores these questions in his new book, Being in the Age of AI. Drawing from ancient wisdom, neuroscience, and AI, the book looks at how we can approach technology with greater awareness and use it to enhance our well-being, creativity, and sense of purpose. Congratulations, Poonacha, on Being in the Age of AI. I’m very happy to see this book enter the world.
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